Thunderbird line wrapping causing hard line breaks. [SOLVED]

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

Help! I'm going nuts with this one. I'm running Thunderbird 52.2 on my Gentoo machine as well as on a VM running CentOS 6. The two are behaving differently and I cannot figure out why. This is a bit hard to explain:

I always use text format emails. Thunderbird on my CentOS VM is working the way I want: As I'm entering a long paragraph with no hard line breaks, the display line wraps (display ONLY), and when I save it as a draft that long paragraph is saved as one physical line.

This is NOT what's happening for me on my Gentoo machine...again same version: As I'm keying in a long paragraph, the lines wrap in the display and apperas much as above, but when I save it as a draft that wrapping gets saved as hard line breaks. This is just awful, as adding a words onto the previous saved paragraph requires totally reformatting the paragraph.

For the life of me I CANNOT figure it out or find a setting that controls this...driving me batshit.

Thanks!
Tom

charles17 · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 3664

Have you diffed (or vimdiffed) the ~/.thunderbird/<salted dir>/prefs.js files from both systems?

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

I've read several things about settings in Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor, but all settings there I can find related to line wrapping are the same:

mail.wrap_ling_lines true
plain_test.wrap_long_lines false

I'm gonna loose my mind with this one.

Tom

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 5:58 pm Post subject:

I had the same problem some time ago, but can't remember how I fixed it. However, perhaps if I tell you my current settings that I think are relevant, that might be of help:

'Edit' > 'Preferences' > 'Advanced' > 'Config Editor...'

Search: wrap

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

Thanks for the replies. OMG...I actually found it and it was REALLY obscure. See the very last comment here regarding the Enigmail plugin (which is installed on my Gentoo version but NOT on the other):

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155622

My CentOS version had that mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed defaulted to true. I had to change that to true on my Gentoo version to get the same behavior. Just to REALLY make that hard to find, possibly because it's a difference in the default, that setting did NOT appear in either pref.js file until I added that true override on the Gentoo version. Holy crap!

Tom

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

Yup...I just discovered when I disable Enigmail the default for that value changes to true. You know shit like this, changing a fairly important and EXTREMELY obscure setting...and one that makes using text email all but impossible no less...with no warning, just plain fucking pisses me off. See others griping about it here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/enigmail/bugs/53/

Also note that when I switched from thunderbird-bin to compiled thunderbird that was installed and activated by default. I hadn't proactively done any of this. I'm beginning to think everyone associated with anything related to Mozilla are just a bunch of dicks frankly.</rant>

Tom

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

Oh my God...Oh...my...God. After updating to Thunderbird 52.5.0 this behavior resumed. It turned out that the update had re-enabled enigmail and thus reset that mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed to false!

Again, specifically because the config setting has an obscure name that includes nothing resembling "wrap"...I just spent another hour re-investigating how to fix this all over! I literally ended up finding my own thread here on Google. This sort of shit is inexcusable. I wish someone who isn't an asshole of the highest order would fork Thunderbird much like Palemoon. No words at all.

Tom